Building a Real Food Kitchen and Raising Resilient Kids with Liz Haselmayer of Homegrown Education

This week on The Less Stressed Life, I’m so excited to have Liz Haselmayer, creator of Homegrown Education, join me for this week’s episode! Liz is a passionate advocate for real food, holistic health, and intentional parenting, and she’s sharing her inspiring journey—from overcoming an eating disorder to raising her family with a focus on nourishment and wellness.

In this episode, we dive into the importance of building a food value system, balancing modern life with a real food framework, and how small, sustainable changes can transform your family’s health. Liz’s practical tips and personal experiences are exactly what you need if you’ve been wondering how to simplify your own real food journey or get your family on board.

Liz also shares her unique perspective on how history can guide our food choices, how to navigate resistance from loved ones, and why ditching extremes is key to long-term health success.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Building food values without fear or shame
• Using history as a guide to better food choices
• Mitigating toxins in food and water for your family
• Leveraging nutrient-dense foods and simple meal prep hacks
• How to inspire your spouse and kids to embrace a real food lifestyle
• Balancing modern life with nourishing, intentional choices

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ABOUT GUEST:
Liz Haselmayer is the creator of Homegrown Education—an inspirational hub for families who want to pursue real food, holistic health, and intentional parenting. Liz homeschools her three daughters in the suburbs of Cincinnati and hosts The Homegrown Podcast with her husband, Joey.

WHERE TO FIND:
Website: https://www.homegrowneducation.org/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/homegrown_education/

WHERE TO FIND CHRISTA:
Website: https://www.christabiegler.com/
Instagram: @anti.inflammatory.nutritionist
Podcast Instagram: @lessstressedlife
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lessstressedlife
Leave a review, submit a questions for the podcast or take one of my quizzes here: ****https://www.christabiegler.com/links

NUTRITION PHILOSOPHY:

• Over restriction is dead
• Whole food is soul food and fed is best
• Sustainable, synergistic nutrition is in (the opposite of whack-a-mole supplementation & supplement graveyards)
• You don’t have to figure it out alone
• Do your best and leave the rest

SPONSOR:  
Thanks to Jigsaw Health for sponsoring this episode! Try their MagSoothe or MagSRT for better sleep and less stress. From now until Dec 1, use code LESSSTRESSED15 at JigsawHealth.com for 15% off!

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TRANSCRIPT:

[00:00:00] Liz Haselmayer: you can't walk in fear around food and you also have to have these conversations with your kids and in front of your kids too because my kids are out in public and they have access to All kinds of garbage

[00:00:11] Christa Biegler, RD: I'm your host, Christa Biegler, and I'm going to guess we have at least one thing in common that we're both in pursuit of a less stressed life. On this show, I'll be interviewing experts and sharing clinical pearls from my years of practice to support high performing health savvy women in pursuit of abundance and a less stressed life.

[00:00:40] Christa Biegler, RD: One of my beliefs is that we always have options for getting the results we want. So let's see what's out there together.

[00:00:58] Christa Biegler, RD: Today on The Less Stressed Life, I have Liz Hasselmeyer, who is the creator of Homegrown Education, an inspirational hub for families who want to pursue real food, holistic health, and intentional parenting. Liz homeschools with her three daughters in the suburbs of Cincinnati and hosts the Homegrown Podcast with her husband.

[00:01:14] Christa Biegler, RD: Joey, and I was on the homegrown podcast talking about eczema a while back with Joey and Liz and then invited her over here because people are always looking for what are some things I can apply today? What are some things I can do today for my health? So welcome to the show, Liz. 

[00:01:31] Liz Haselmayer: I love that. Great intro. 

[00:01:33] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. Yeah. Welcome. All right. So we always like to start with story because that's where people zoom in, identify. And usually we land in the health space, not always, but sometimes our own struggles are how we land where we land. Like you probably didn't say, I think I want to be a podcaster and sell some products and some workbooks and homeschool my children.

[00:01:55] Christa Biegler, RD: So let's like unravel the story where all the things started for you. 

[00:02:01] Liz Haselmayer: Yeah, I love sharing this just because I feel like so many people connect to my story because I feel like I lived the quintessential 90s and early 2000s childhood and upbringing and millennial parenting like I'm just walking in it.

[00:02:15] Liz Haselmayer: I grew up in Cincinnati at, like I said, early nineties, baby. When I became a middle schooler, I'll say around 12, 13, really started to have a terrible relationship with food and, dabbled in restrictive eating and overexercising, and eventually over a few years, it. turn into full blown bulimia.

[00:02:38] Liz Haselmayer: And my relationship with food was horrid, and my food in my home was a mixture of, all the processed foods, the hamburger helper, the instant rice, but also home cooked meals. My dad was a pilot for Delta, my mom was a stay at home mom, I'm one of four kids very just normal suburban life.

[00:02:55] Liz Haselmayer: And She was also chronically ill. And for a lot of my upbringing, she was struggling with her own health issues. And so I have this terrible eating disorder and years and years of dieticians and therapists and eventually inpatient treatment in Arizona for 90 days. And so that was really like the final kind of okay, let's get this figured out because.

[00:03:16] Liz Haselmayer: We don't want to see you die, frankly. I've lost friends in the space. Unfortunately it's a really tragic thing. And so I realized as I exited that program and I was, 18 years old that I still didn't really know anything about food. I just, understood, okay, binging and purging is bad habit.

[00:03:37] Liz Haselmayer: And there's probably underlying psychological influences going on. I think for me it was like a lack of identity. And so I think about that with my own girls is, not leaving that gap in their childhood, giving them strong identity so that they don't have to go running looking for it somewhere else.

[00:03:53] Liz Haselmayer: But for me, I was still lacking in this real appreciation for nourishing my body and like having a respect for my body, building strength in my body. I didn't have any of that. I was just like, Oh, face your fear foods. I could go on and on about now in hindsight, looking back at the treatment that I received and just how flawed it is.

[00:04:11] Liz Haselmayer: And unfortunately, there's so many good practitioners, so many like good willing hearts out there who want to save these girls. And the method needs to change. change, I think. I think it's outdated and it's not emphasizing the right things. And so for my program I was in, it's very much like exposure therapy, let's practice going out to eat, let's talk about how much of your burrito you're going to finish, let's talk about the foods that you're afraid to eat and then go ahead and eat the cookie.

[00:04:37] Liz Haselmayer: And While it was successful in me stopping my binge purge habit and recovering from bulimia, quote, I, like I said, didn't have an appreciation for real food and didn't understand what that was. So then when I became a mom, this became an issue because with my second born, I was faced with an unexpected birth defect diagnosis and thrown in the trash.

[00:04:58] Liz Haselmayer: Out of my element and I was like how does this happen? And the answer I kept getting was like, oh, environmental, we're not sure. Could be a number of things. And so I started to connect these two very seemingly separate paths of my real food journey and my appreciation for food nourishment and health.

[00:05:17] Liz Haselmayer: And also now this child that I'm growing inside of me has something potentially wrong and we're not sure where it comes from, but Did I have any influence in that or do I have any power or positive impact in how she's growing? And so this was this shift in my mind with so many other people where you face a health crisis.

[00:05:35] Liz Haselmayer: You're like, wow, is there something else I can do? Should I flip the bottles over and start reading the labels? Of course, the answer was yes. For her, it was bilateral clubbed feet and, very fixable birth defect. I was told by my OB oh, you're lucky. This is the best birth defect to get.

[00:05:49] Liz Haselmayer: And I was like, not something you should say to a mom. It's like, trying to nurture this like 20 week pregnancy, but okay. And yeah, from there I started in the home. And I was like, okay this was like the rise of the essential oil era, right? And so everyone's giving me all of these, 

[00:06:05] Christa Biegler, RD: there are so many eras tucked in here, let's be real. Someone I had just gone on the street and someone like made a reference to essential oils. I was like, that was 2016. Thank you very much. Like she was referencing it. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Anyway, carry on. 

[00:06:21] Liz Haselmayer: My daughter was born in 2016, so that's so funny that you use that exact date, because you're right, it was.

[00:06:28] Liz Haselmayer: This is why I say I've lived the quintessential life, right? The central era boom, I have all of these very willing participants showing me how to detoxify my life. And I say that kind of jokingly now, but it was really helpful for me to understand like, Oh, I could use a plant derived fragrance, or I could use a medicinal oil in this way, or, Opened the door to maybe like herbology or other modalities of healing that were outside of the It's a gateway drug I jumped into that for 18 months and really tried to clean up my home and then it was like, oh Even before I finished that process, I ran into feeding issues with my daughter and so we did this crazy thing where we homemade her formula with raw goat's milk from a local farm.

[00:07:15] Liz Haselmayer: And it's just you want people to look at you crazy? Tell them that you make your baby's formula at home with raw milk. 

[00:07:20] Christa Biegler, RD: Especially in 

[00:07:20] Christa Biegler, RD: 2017 or 2016. 

[00:07:22] Liz Haselmayer: Exactly. I know 

[00:07:23] Christa Biegler, RD: it 

[00:07:23] Christa Biegler, RD: wasn't that long ago, but we've come a long way. Already 

[00:07:26] Liz Haselmayer: come such a long way. I'm so proud of all of the mainstream attention that raw milk is getting I really think it, it makes it easier for moms and dads who are trying to make those choices because they can see examples of people who are living and breathing and they can have access to farms.

[00:07:42] Liz Haselmayer: So anyway, so that's like the long winded version of how I became so interested in food and health and parenting and just stumbling along. the way and running into obstacles and then thinking like what can I do about this? Finding the answer. 

[00:08:00] Christa Biegler, RD: I have a lot of parallels, which is not surprising to me.

[00:08:04] Christa Biegler, RD: When I first moved to the middle of nowhere in 2010, I was burned out from school and all the things. There was a lot going on there. I was very burned out and I like very much got into homesteading stuff. I do think that was like the blogging era. All of that information was at your fingertips.

[00:08:20] Christa Biegler, RD: The internet wasn't fast like it is now, but it was like when that stuff was becoming more mainstream. Now I do think that we were like early adopters of it, which is comical. It's really comical. That'd be very comical for my mother to hear that. Because I always think like my parents were very homesteady way before it was cool.

[00:08:40] Christa Biegler, RD: Very much, like I grew up in very homesteady family, like my mom took the homeopathy kid off the shelf when she like never took us to the doctor and some people have the opposite story because that was a time, there was a time where it was like all those kids, if you're like 50, you were probably formula fed, which is like hard, but I'm using my brothers as the anchor point of that age.

[00:09:01] Christa Biegler, RD: Yep. You were that old if you were formula fed probably. And then shortly after. You were probably not formula fed anymore. And then it transcended from there. So I went through my own milking goat phase, making my own cheese until I got pregnant with my second child. And I was like, I'm not milking a goat all winter.

[00:09:16] Christa Biegler, RD: No one likes my cheese, all the things. And last summer I went to a dietician farm camp, which I live in the middle of. Nowhere on a farm already, but I went to a farm camp and we made sourdough and it like relit this old fire that was inside of me because somewhere in between there, between the homesteading journey for me, which was really 2010 to probably parts of 2015.

[00:09:39] Christa Biegler, RD: Like I thought I was the healthiest person I knew cause I made tons of kombucha and drank tons of kombucha. And I have like slightly different feelings about what that was like. about that in general. But and then after that, I had my own health crisis. And then around that same time, I like went into private practice.

[00:09:53] Christa Biegler, RD: So really not so unlike you. But in your story, getting out of the eating disorder facility was truly the very beginning of your health journey. You just didn't really know it yet until you encountered the essential oil gateway drug, which is once you're in. And the thing about the thing, the reason the rise of the essential oils happened is because multi level marketing was very hot.

[00:10:17] Christa Biegler, RD: Very hot. And I think it's ebbed and flowed throughout the decade, or a few decades probably because even when my parents, I remember when I was a kid, like my parents being involved in Amway or they have their own like thing, people selling them things. But because of that, a lot of times with multi level marketing, there's, the side effect is a lot of personal development.

[00:10:34] Christa Biegler, RD: Quite honestly, right? So it's not always this bad thing. It was a gateway for me for personal development when I needed it the absolute most. And so through that personal development, you were getting all these other pieces. So the other thing that I think happens is when you start to go into health, there's this extreme dogmaticness to it.

[00:10:52] Christa Biegler, RD: Now, yours is a little bit different. Like your extreme dogma went earlier. And I love what you I am in this two year ministry program and it's like breaking open all my inside pieces and it's all about identity right now. And I'm like, Oh my gosh, I just feel like this is like I'm craving this information so much.

[00:11:10] Christa Biegler, RD: But to your point, I think everyone struggles with that. So thank you for the reminder. Something that's like hard for me to hear your story as I have a 12 year old right now. And so it's just yeah when you were that age, that was, and we had all these things, but for some reason, when you're a parent, you just think that your kid is not that old. 

[00:11:26] Liz Haselmayer: I know. I think about that too. My oldest is 13 and I already look at her and I'm like, you have already avoided so much. And a part of me feels like really proud of that, really excited, but I also know that like I'm just in the beginning of this teenage era and that I still have such a big hill to climb and it's not something I take lightly.

[00:11:43] Liz Haselmayer: I really do think about my girls and their identity and everything that's rooted in that. 

[00:11:49] Christa Biegler, RD: I want to come back to potentially later I'll just even mention it now like sometimes at the beginning there's quite a bit of dogma and then we realize that being really dogmatic and strict and I watch people walk this and I am a living testament to it as well.

[00:12:03] Christa Biegler, RD: It's like you get a bit extreme initially and then it's like we cannot live in extremes forever. I don't personally think the greatest joy of my life right now is helping people like enjoy birthday cake, right? Like enjoying life, enjoying food overcoming unnecessary food restrictions. That is so much more important to me than most things that people resolve in their health journeys because I don't know.

[00:12:28] Christa Biegler, RD: I think food is joy, right? Food is like social. Food is all these things for us. And as you went through your own things and figured it out, I wonder if there was a little bit of dogmatic ness, especially with that history of addiction. And I don't care if it's bulimia or anorexia or just orthorexia, right?

[00:12:45] Christa Biegler, RD: Orthorexia, of course, being the condition of being like, I don't know if we have a real definition, but it's to health conscious, which feels like an understatement, maybe, but whatever. It's being dogmatic. It's being really dogmatic. So I'm curious if you also went through phases of that after you got going in your homesteady life. 

[00:13:04] Liz Haselmayer: Yeah. My real food kind of journey. I do. That's such an important question because I think if you have a history of eating disorder then everyone freaks out the moment you have specific food values. They, because I came from this treatment system of all food is good. All food is healthy. Any food is fine.

[00:13:26] Liz Haselmayer: Just don't throw it back up. Don't eat too much of it. You know what I'm saying? 

[00:13:30] Christa Biegler, RD: Totally. 

[00:13:30] Liz Haselmayer: It's when I was really angry when I realized like there's no. I can have a value system in my food without having disordered eating. That is two completely different things. And so for me to have a value system with my food, I'm not looking at it.

[00:13:45] Liz Haselmayer: As this is good food or bad food, I'm looking at it as this is nutrient dense, fueling my body, serving a purpose, or this is nutrient lacking, or this is a fun food that I'm enjoying in the moment, aka my birthday cake, or this is something that I'm using to fuel for a workout, like everything has a purpose, and I think The whole idea that the opposite of an eating disorder is just being okay to eat whatever food you want is such trash.

[00:14:15] Liz Haselmayer: And I think it makes me angry that was pitched to me as you'll be healthy, you'll have a good food relationship if you can just feel comfortable eating the cookie. And what I want to tell people when I wanted to tell my younger self is let's talk about that cookie. Could you have zero shame around eating the cookie?

[00:14:35] Liz Haselmayer: Absolutely. Could you also then want to make the cookie perhaps from scratch with slightly better ingredients because you don't really care for the canola oil in it? Or could you still hold that as your truth and be okay with that? Yeah, that doesn't mess up everything. That doesn't throw everything out the window just because you say, I want to have a higher quality ingredient.

[00:14:56] Liz Haselmayer: I want to recognize what food is real food and what food is just honestly hyper processed trash. And it's okay for me to say that, and you know what, it's okay for me to hold food to a value scale, and yet I still don't have fear over it. I can still go to the movies, and I can Joey is notorious for getting the trashiest candy at the movie theater.

[00:15:18] Liz Haselmayer: He loves it. Those like rainbow airhead gummy things. He'll shoot me for even saying this on a podcast, but like every time we go to the movies, which is probably twice a year, we get the popcorn with the crappy butter on it. And he gets those little gummies and you know what? I eat a couple because they're delicious.

[00:15:35] Liz Haselmayer: And I know one, I'm not scared of that food. I also know it doesn't really fall very high on my food value scale. So it's not something I'm going to eat every day, but I'm not scared of it. And I just think. That freaks people out and they want a clear list. Tell me what to eat, tell me what not to eat, tell me how to prepare my food, tell me which ingredient to avoid and if I turn it over and most of the ingredients are really good, but it has citric acid, am I scared of it?

[00:16:01] Liz Haselmayer: No! So there's this huge lack of balance in the real food and wellness space and that is something where, I just think it comes from people's anxiety to stress over every little detail. And they end up missing so much of the big picture. They end up stressing over every ingredient and eating zero protein.

[00:16:20] Liz Haselmayer: And I'm like, doesn't matter how clean your ingredients are if you're not even hitting your macros. What are you really focusing on? So I think that is something I try to push against is I love that you're like, I want people to enjoy their birthday cake. Same. I do too. I'm also totally cool to make my birthday cake from scratch.

[00:16:37] Liz Haselmayer: But if I'm at a party where it's like store bought cake, I'm not like, Oh, I can't eat that, so it's, 

[00:16:43] Christa Biegler, RD: Oh, I love that you brought this example up with Joey and the candy. I think this is very important. And I don't know if we're like moving toward this supposed balance, but I think the concept that's key here is your discussion around food value system.

[00:16:57] Christa Biegler, RD: And I do wonder if it took you, the real question is like, how long did it take you to embody that vindication of food values? And or how do we help people develop food values? I want to back up before you answer that question. And I want to say I love thinking about the root cause of the root cause of the root cause because someone might present as, Oh, I good food, bad food, whatever.

[00:17:17] Christa Biegler, RD: Or I want to be told exactly how to do it. You see this crap all the time. Of course. This is like literally my thing. The bod, like one of the root causes of this is a feeling of I don't trust myself. I've been given evidence to not trust myself. And I don't know if this is true or false, but one question I have, and cause I asked you, if you had to go through a dogmatic period, maybe because of your disordered eating history previously, you were able to skip over that part as an adult, because to be perfectly honest, I did not have disordered eating history.

[00:17:51] Christa Biegler, RD: And I got pulled into it. My story is a little bit like this. So I got pulled into elimination diet space because it was hot and cool in 2010. And it did work that people can manipulate their diet and feel like less inflammation and feel better. And there's ways to go about that. And then there's less healthy ways to go about that potentially.

[00:18:08] Christa Biegler, RD: And I feel like we've evolved a lot since then. And really it's like real food at the end of the day. So anyway. Developing food value. How long did it take you to embody this food values like this very vindicated like you really knew yourself. I feel like the way you describe this is like I'm confident in myself and quite honestly very commonly when people are going through health journeys, they have lost all trust in their body. 

[00:18:32] Liz Haselmayer: Yeah. 

[00:18:33] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. So that might be the missing piece. So what would you say to people about developing food values as well or developing honestly like even an identity around food. Yeah. 

[00:18:43] Liz Haselmayer: I would say honestly, it took me probably five years to figure out how to strike my balance, but I did that completely alone.

[00:18:50] Liz Haselmayer: I did that pre social media. I did that pre any sort of external resource. I was basically calling the people I knew personally or was connected to from my farm, asking random ladies about making homemade formula while also still buying my husband flaming hot cheetos at the grocery store because that's what he wanted at the time.

[00:19:11] Liz Haselmayer: This is nine years ago. And so I had to move through these phases and eventually we were like, you know what, these make me feel like garbage. And it's funny because the more you eat real food, the more the. fake food stands out to you. And so I, again, I'm not like scared to ever dabble in that kind of food, but it's not my every day.

[00:19:29] Liz Haselmayer: And so I would say the five years of me really shifting of okay, maybe it was 40 percent whole real food and 60 percent I'm still figuring it out. Every year I gained another 10 percent of ground to where now I feel like so much of our food is truthfully just We've got it dialed in and it's maybe a five or ten percent of that two times a year of like the absolute hilarious The food babe would cry if she knew that I ever had an errand, and so those times again I just think you can't walk in fear around food and you also have to have these conversations with your kids and in front of your kids too because my kids are out in public and they have access to All kinds of garbage and so we talk about what that means with them as well so I'm not trying to hold a certain standard in my home that I don't also expect them to hold, but I want to give them the why.

[00:20:26] Liz Haselmayer: Okay, I'd so much rather explain to them how to view food than tell them exactly, oh, no, we don't eat that. Oh, we eat that. Oh, yeah, huh, we eat that. Because then the other thing that happens is that, and I've walked through this too, is you get such a sense of pride over your clean, healthy eating choices.

[00:20:46] Liz Haselmayer: And I'm not saying that's all bad, but when it becomes your identity of this is who I am, I only eat this, I would never touch that, I would never use this product, I would never do da. Then that's just slipping right into the identity piece again, and you're just filling it with something that's also not going to serve you in the long run.

[00:21:03] Liz Haselmayer: It's, I would say the five year mark, but that's again, just me soloing it. I think people nowadays with so much attention and so much readily available information, I think you could refresh your kitchen in 30 days, truthfully. I think you could shape your food value by listening to a couple podcasts, figuring out your food budget and practice grocery shopping.

[00:21:27] Liz Haselmayer: And I think in three to six months, you could be like, wow, my, my life has transformed. 

[00:21:31] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, I think that's cool. And I also appreciate the real timeline because mine was something, it was like a few years because I was working with people and I'd gone through my own food sensitivity journey.

[00:21:42] Christa Biegler, RD: And so I had a pantry full of you, very unique ingredients. And even to this day, I could cook with, for someone with any food sensitivity, like it was the easiest thing. Because I've had practice because I've had practice The only difference between making something like this easy is basically practice and I'm going to rephrase something you just talked about with kids because I think it's important because one of the things I want to talk to you about is what if my kids or my husband's not on board and I've loved how you've alluded to this already and I know that I don't know the whole story of Joey coming on the podcast.

[00:22:13] Christa Biegler, RD: I can't wait to talk about this in a second. But before we do, healing your own food identity and values is an important part of shaping And sharing with your kids because it's really about done with love instead of scarcity And I can tell the entire generation and age group of women who had mothers who hated their bodies And I don't know what your mom had for chronic illness but The people who had mothers that hate their body are the ones that are like, I need to lose weight.

[00:22:40] Christa Biegler, RD: I need to do this. I need to do that. And it's literally like a whole big swath timeline of women. And I don't say this judgmentally. It's we gotta know where we came from, where we learned things. One thing I did have going for me is if my mom didn't like her body, she did not express it.

[00:22:57] Christa Biegler, RD: To me, I do not remember her expressing it to me, which I do feel probably was a role in me not developing an eating disorder. And just by the way loose data, 50 percent of dietitians have had disordered eating history. That's why they go into it. I think therapists have a similar type of background, right?

[00:23:17] Christa Biegler, RD: And yeah, there's a lot to say there. Like, all these systems, a lot of things are broken. But I will say, I do think we're like, I'd love to believe we've made major progress. Does that mean all inpatient eating disorder facilities would be progressive? No, absolutely not. But, whatever.

[00:23:32] Christa Biegler, RD: Anyway so healing your own food identity, loving your own body, even though you want to change it, which is a whole different podcast episode we actually have, literally with that title. Is an important part of sharing with your kids, so it's not like this good food, bad food mentality. And I think maybe if I would want to invite you to something, it's to really observe your own language and your own behavior around things.

[00:23:53] Christa Biegler, RD: Because to be honest, our environment is just a mirror of our own thoughts. I don't know, just a thought. I love, love, love the timeline and that I love that you offer very clear steps. You could learn, you could figure out your food budget and you could go practice.

[00:24:09] Christa Biegler, RD: Oops. Amazing. 

[00:24:11] Liz Haselmayer: Yeah. 

[00:24:11] Christa Biegler, RD: Absolutely. That's where it starts. I want to talk about, let's actually go straight to kids and husbands because they've flirted in this conversation so far. And then maybe we'll talk about some tenants of the real food journey or the real food framework a bit.

[00:24:23] Christa Biegler, RD: How about people who say, let's start with the husband, let's start with the adults, right? And we'll go back to the kids. What? Would you say to people, because I've heard this version of something through the years, like my husband's not on board, or how do you get your husband to be on board? And I have my own thoughts about that at this juncture, but what would you say? 

[00:24:43] Liz Haselmayer: So I would say a few things. 

[00:24:44] Christa Biegler, RD: So a while back my college aged daughter shared with me that she was tossing and turning and waking up several times per night after a period of stress. We started her on magnesium and her sleep immediately improved. I personally think magnesium should be your first thing to try if you're having trouble sleeping or staying asleep, especially tossing and turning, and it's a no brainer if you have any restless leg issues.

[00:25:09] Christa Biegler, RD: The thing about magnesium is that there's a lot of types of magnesium that will give you symptomatic relief, but I like to steer my clients and loved ones to a more absorbable form of magnesium, because most big box magnesium is magcitrate, and that will push bowels, but it can be damaging to your teeth if it's used daily and it's not the most Rather, Jigsaw Health makes one of my favorite great tasting magnesium powders called MagSue that has magnesium glycinate, my favorite calming and absorbable type of magnesium. It's available in both a great tasting powder and to go packets, and they also make a product that's great for slow release, especially if you have restless legs, called MagSRT.

[00:25:51] Christa Biegler, RD: So, If you are not falling asleep easily or if you have disrupted sleep, you can try at least 200 milligrams of great magnesium like MagSoothe or MagSRT, especially if you have restless legs. It works better to take this at least 20 minutes before you go to bed to allow it to kick in and you can get a on All of Jigsaw's amazing products, including MagSooth at Jigsaw Health with the code LESSSTRESS10.

[00:26:16] Christa Biegler, RD: Now you can use LESSSTRESS10 as many times as you want with every order at Jigsaw Health, which is honestly pretty unheard of with coupon codes. So enjoy the magnesium from Jigsaw with my code LESSSTRESS10.

[00:26:30] Liz Haselmayer: One, there's a grace period with both husbands and kids, and two, Now we're stereotyping, right? There's plenty of health savvy husbands who I'm sure have to will their wives to get on board. But in general, it's usually the female, the one who's making most of the food decisions in the home, buying most of the things, cooking most of the things, staying home with the kids, if that's her role.

[00:26:48] Liz Haselmayer: That's, then she's got eyes on that, right? And one, there's a grace period, okay? Like I said, I was buying raw milk, and he was like, totally supportive of making this beautiful nutrient rich raw milk for our baby. And then also he's but I want a snack at night. And so here's my Flamin Hots.

[00:27:04] Liz Haselmayer: Now I was still learning. I didn't come to him with I have all the information and here now go make a change. I was like, Hey, I'm starting to figure this stuff out. It freaks me out a little bit. This is what I'm going to do. This is who I'm learning from. And so I think it just, you depends with every situation is going to be a little different but I will say a way to motivate a man is for Joey it was performance driven the second he realized oh I don't have to wake up and feel sluggish or I don't have to feel like I even crave crunchy salty snacks at nighttime I can actually lift harder in the gym if I'm eating better food.

[00:27:39] Liz Haselmayer: Oh, I don't have to pound 12 beers at a campfire to have fun. I can actually just enjoy my time with my buddies, maybe have one drink. And then that turned into maybe I could train for a marathon. And then he cut out alcohol completely. And then he, I don't know. started upping his raw milk intake. And so for him, it's so performance driven, but that's who he is.

[00:28:01] Liz Haselmayer: That's his personality. He is, I'm going to go do something. And he sets off and he does it. And the man just shot a moose in Newfoundland with the bow and arrow. Okay. This is, he broke a 24 year record. This outfitter has never had anyone successfully do that. So performance driven is always a lane. You could try if that speaks to your husband, if not, Talk about like why you're doing it.

[00:28:23] Liz Haselmayer: Hey, I want to feel better. I want to wake up. I want to show it better for my kids. I want to show it better for my job. I want to show it better for my work. I'm not saying we have to cut everything out. I'm just saying that our main sustenance, we should be checking our boxes. Let's hit our meals.

[00:28:35] Liz Haselmayer: Let's get our meals really squared away. Maybe we figure out the snacks later down the line. Don't try to find the healthiest potato chip. If you're still not getting 30 grams of protein in the morning, start with your bigger rocks. And then move in to Oh, okay, now I can level up this area of my life, this area of my nutrition, this area of my wellness.

[00:28:55] Liz Haselmayer: And talking to them about why you want to do that. If you have a husband who you say all these things to, and they're still like, I just want to feel like trash, maybe they need to work on some identity stuff, maybe there's something blocking them. Because, I don't know a single human who you look at them and you say, Hey, do you want to be higher performing?

[00:29:12] Liz Haselmayer: Do you want to feel better and do better things with your life and live bigger and have abundance and get excited and have a zest for life? Or do you just want to shrink and feel just like average? I don't know anyone who is I'd rather be average. And so food is just one example of that.

[00:29:27] Liz Haselmayer: Fitness could be the same thing, and so those often go hand in hand, which are really beautiful because one drives the other. Oh, you want to start working out and lifting a bunch, start eating a bunch of protein. And then guess what? You're going to be Feeling fueled and ready to go. And you're going to be excited when you see yourself put on some muscle.

[00:29:44] Liz Haselmayer: So I came at it through, I'm still learning. And then Joey's motivation that he picked up, I would say after about two years of us really in this space, he was like, Oh yeah, performance. Like I want to be better. So that sounds amazing. And I'm going to do that. And I think as long as it's not Hey, I'm, the other piece I was, is don't try to take away everything all at once.

[00:30:07] Liz Haselmayer: If there's better alternatives, if you could find something that's maybe not as bad, but maybe it's fried avocado oil, or maybe it's a snack that you guys make together. Maybe you guys just pop some popcorn at home and it's like just butter and salt. It's just chill. Not saying you can never snack, but maybe let's pick something a little bit differently.

[00:30:25] Liz Haselmayer: If you find good substitutes and alternatives for them, or they're finding that for themselves too. Same thing for your kids. Then you don't really miss anything. You don't feel like you're lacking. 

[00:30:35] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. So I remember this popped into my head as you were talking about your husband. And I remember a client at one time doing, changing some things in her diet and her lifestyle.

[00:30:45] Christa Biegler, RD: And I remember she told me that she told her husband, I don't want you to, you don't have to eat this way. I do not want you to complain. I want you to be supportive. She was very firm and clear about what she needed to align the culture of the home, which worked for her. I will also say not everyone's husband will respond in that.

[00:31:03] Christa Biegler, RD: supportive way or family member. I don't care. Pick your point. Like it might be aunt Sally. Who cares? I will say, cause there's always, I have this running joke right now that 50 percent of the things I help clients with are maybe nutritional. The other 50 percent are purely emotional.

[00:31:18] Christa Biegler, RD: Maybe it's 75, 25 sometimes, but we cannot hinge our happiness on anyone else's behavior. So we'll just remind ourselves of this. And I do think we don't win if we're trying to be controlling or judgmental. And I'm not, I'm like pointing at myself with three fingers as well. Like I am an imperfect person and sometimes I like pull back from things with my husband, and you just, you also breadcrumb.

[00:31:41] Christa Biegler, RD: My oldest child, now that she is in college, recounts what growing up in our household was like for me, like real food was terrible. how it was. And she was used to that. She was good at, that did not start that way. But she said that in middle school the girls were mean and thought that her mom cooked crazy stuff.

[00:31:59] Christa Biegler, RD: I actually didn't know about this. She didn't really share it with me at that time, but she shared it with me recently. And then in high school, they learned about nutrition and then they were like, I wish we could eat at your house. And she's It was just funny. And so now that I have a middle schooler, our main thing was really, I'm using the same performance mentality conversation with her.

[00:32:17] Christa Biegler, RD: It's girlfriend, I can tell you're grouchy when you don't get protein. When you start the day. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about getting enough food. And I think that's the main thing. It's like, how do we fuel, which is different words you said, like, how do we fuel and get enough? And hopefully that is what comes in the future.

[00:32:32] Christa Biegler, RD: Hopefully that is the future of our nutrition with our children and how we communicate with them. And it's not about shrinking. It's not about scarcity. It's not about Oh my God. And the school, I actually used to review school lunch program, like in 2012. And there's all kinds of things around that I actually don't have a huge dog in that fight because it really boils down to whoever's in charge at that moment because they might not even be following the rules.

[00:32:55] Christa Biegler, RD: But my point is we're still like low fat milk, all these things that we just, you know. Is what it is. But I would love for us to be like, very focused on let's get enough protein. That's how we make our brain work for the day. That's how we start and not be snacky throughout the day.

[00:33:08] Christa Biegler, RD: So those are my thoughts about kids. Now, the same child who is now coming around slowly literally used to complain to me that she had to go to grandma's down the road to get the ingredients to make cookies. All I had was organic stuff. So I was just like, what is this life? Are you my child?

[00:33:24] Christa Biegler, RD: Like what's going on right now, but we're coming around. It's going to be fine. All is well, striking the balance. 

[00:33:30] Liz Haselmayer: Yeah, and your kids will go through different phases, right? Like my four year old, she'll look at me and she'll be eating her raw milk yogurt and her homemade granola and her kefir and her She'll say i'm like the healthiest four year old.

[00:33:41] Liz Haselmayer: I'm like, yeah girl. You're crushing it like get it like You'll your body well, and then my 13 year old will go out to lunch with her grandpa and be like, I'm so excited for a coke and I'm like, okay, girl I understand. This is the phase you're in. You're making your way. I don't drink coke.

[00:33:56] Liz Haselmayer: I'll crush an Ollipop. Love that. Love a little carbonated water. There's different things, but everyone will go through different periods of their own dogma and identity forming, including your kids. And so just Don't freak out when they hit that phase, but keep the conversation open because if I was to panic and really press in and be like, never are you allowed to drink soda, I think that would be communicating something very different.

[00:34:20] Liz Haselmayer: The last thing I'll say about the whole husband thing is if you are both At a place where you're like, okay, we agree. We want to be living our best life. Okay. I do think there's power when you can be aligned and I think it's really confusing for kids who grow up in a home where mom is quote the healthy one and dad brings home all of the junk food.

[00:34:42] Liz Haselmayer: And I think I know a lot of people in that space and it just You have to consider what that's communicating to them. Okay, does dad play by different rules than mom plays by? Does the male body, can that take on a different level of nutritional stress? Maybe, but and the same thing goes for fitness.

[00:34:58] Liz Haselmayer: I see a lot of dads who are like really into fitness and the mom's I don't really work out. And it's okay, what is that communicating? Can you both, come to some sort of alignment about how you view health and wellness that you can both mirror in your own ways, maybe you express it differently, but what are you communicating to your kids?

[00:35:13] Liz Haselmayer: So for me, it's, it was this whole I'm bringing Joey into this real food journey. And then he brought me into okay, but let's talk about like moving our body too. And so I joined in on his motivation of Oh, I do like to weight train. I do want to push my body. I do want to set goals for myself.

[00:35:27] Liz Haselmayer: And so that has been really fun to be able to hold each other accountable, but then for our kids to see that we are aligned in that. And I think that can be really powerful. I know it's not possible for everyone. It can be a tension point, but I just think for kids, it can eliminate a lot of that confusion if they see mom and dad are going in the same direction. 

[00:35:45] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. So much we could say about that, I think, probably. And everyone's in a different place. Alright, let's talk about a few pieces of the Real Food Framework. What are some of the parts, if you were building a Real Food Framework now, what are some of the components that have to come to the table? 

[00:36:05] Liz Haselmayer: Yeah, so the real food framework as I zoomed out and was like, okay, what is my food philosophy? Because 

[00:36:11] Liz Haselmayer: I 

[00:36:11] Liz Haselmayer: can't put a title on it, right? I'm not paleo, I'm not keto, I'm not following, strictly like in Sally Fallon's steps, footsteps I'm a blend, right? So how would I communicate this?

[00:36:21] Liz Haselmayer: if I was going to give someone else confidence in their kitchen and their shopping and their meal prep and in their meal composition. And I was like I think a lot of this food confusion around politics and policy and what's healthy and what's not can be dismantled if we just look back at history.

[00:36:38] Liz Haselmayer: And we just see one, how food was, consumed or processed pre industrial revolution, and two, what we deemed healthy in times where we didn't have a lot of like political agency pulling at the strings of our various So I, that's the first sort of tenant or the first pillar of what I call the real food framework is look at food through a historical lens and whatever that means for you.

[00:37:07] Liz Haselmayer: For me, my gateway was raw milk because I saw the political strife that occurred over such a basic staple in America. And I realized that this really highly contested food product was so simple, but that the big reason why we feared it a lot today was just we'd forgotten the history. We forgot.

[00:37:29] Liz Haselmayer: We had forgotten that pasteurization is the new thing and that there's a reason for that and that context no longer applies to a context that maybe we have today. just encourage people to look at food through a historical lens. You could say the same thing with wheat, too, right? Do you need wheat in your life?

[00:37:43] Liz Haselmayer: No. Gluten is not an essential nutrient. Just never eat it if you never want to eat it. But if you do want to consume gluten, maybe there were, like, some Nuggets of wisdom and how we used to process it, right? This sour leavening or the use of sourdough starter to culture your wheat and really ferment it.

[00:38:01] Liz Haselmayer: Or the same thing with corn and nixtamalization. These sort of traditional practices taught us things about how we could eat the food that we wanted. that grew around us. And so looking at food through a historical lens kind of breaks open the political play and just allows you to research what is interesting to you.

[00:38:20] Liz Haselmayer: If you want to look at fats, if you want to look at what would be accessible to you in your area, if you're, in the Midwest versus on the California coast, you're probably going to be eating different things and that's okay. So that's like the number one thing is where I encourage people like, Hey, just dive into the history and you'll learn a lot.

[00:38:36] Liz Haselmayer: You'll learn a lot. 

[00:38:37] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah. Love it. 

[00:38:39] Liz Haselmayer: From there, it's okay now let's talk about how we live in modern day America, and we do have toxins in our food and water supply. How can you mitigate your family's exposure to that? What are the heavy hitters? What can we learn from a very 10, 000 viewpoint, 10, 000 foot viewpoint of hey, can we just avoid some of these big time players in the food and water supply and From there dial it in and just get nuance and you decide your comfort level with that, right?

[00:39:06] Liz Haselmayer: This isn't these are the ten things you can never eat but this is let's be aware that pifas are in the plastic wrapping of your Food in your food containers and that there's things in your water that you probably ought to filter out and that the whole GMO And organic farming conversation is a lot more complex and broader than you think, and it does have implications.

[00:39:27] Liz Haselmayer: Let's talk about the things that don't end up on the ingredient label, but are in your food through added hormones in your animal products leaching through your food packaging, things like that. So that's number two of mitigate your family's toxin exposure with starting with those heavy hitters.

[00:39:45] Liz Haselmayer: And then from there, the last two are really like, Just letters from my kitchen of like, how do you leverage your ingredients? Meaning you're spending a lot of money at the grocery store at your farmer's market or through your local csa How can we get the biggest bang for our buck with this food? How can we ferment the cabbage?

[00:40:03] Liz Haselmayer: How can we slow cook the meat? How can we? Make the homemade salad dressing that also helps regulate our glucose and use it as a veggie starter in the beginning of our meals, right? How can we leverage each ingredient and then optimize your family kitchen is the fourth sort of pillar, right? So this is okay, now I've got all of my sort of ideological understanding about food.

[00:40:26] Liz Haselmayer: I think I understand like what I'm going to avoid. As I keep learning about the different toxins in our food and water supply, I know which ingredients I can keep as a staple in my pantry and fridge, but now I need to know how to grocery shop, meal plan, meal composition, things like that. And so that was it.

[00:40:42] Liz Haselmayer: It was just like, how have I done this in my own life and what's worked in our kitchen and how have we moved through this real food journey through various seasons of, financial stress and growing a family and having more kids and having businesses and birthing businesses. Through all of those phases, we've been able to maintain a really steady real food journey and the things that I've learned through that process are just compiled in what I call a real food framework. 

[00:41:06] Christa Biegler, RD: Yeah, I love it. How do you help others on this journey? I think you are epitomizing, I've gone through this and now I am sharing what I've learned with others, which Isn't that identity? Isn't that like our purpose in life is like to help people shortcut to your earlier point. When we think about. Just like the value we put forth in the world. It is, oh, the point was you talked about it taking you five years to strike that balance, but people could get to a place where they could see results, how they feel, et cetera, within a month or two.

[00:41:43] Christa Biegler, RD: And so how do you help people expedite that process now? 

[00:41:47] Liz Haselmayer: Yeah. Something we did really. Absolutely. I think it was the beginning of 2024. Wow. That seems like a long time ago. Earlier this year with our community, we did something called a real food reset because I was like, you know what? I'd love like to capitalize on some of the energy of the new year.

[00:42:02] Liz Haselmayer: I personally love The new year. I'm like, yeah, my goals. Like I don't do resolutions, but I have a bunch of just I'm such a sucker for that new year energy. So I was like, let's do a real food reset. And for one week out of the month, we'll focus on a new thing. And we had hundreds of people do this with us.

[00:42:20] Liz Haselmayer: And people were like, Oh, it's really that simple. And I think they just needed me to be able to say listen, you can make change in 7 days, like you can really make change in your life faster than you think you can. So for our real food reset, we'd focus on a new thing each week. So the first week we focused on protein and I was just like, Hey, listen you can set your protein goal, but I want you to like, stick to it every time for me.

[00:42:45] Liz Haselmayer: I was going to do one gram of body. One gram of protein per ideal pound of body weight. And I had just come off of doing 75 hard, so I was like, already in this space, right? So I was like, okay, we're gonna hit a protein goal. Your week one, you're gonna do seven days of that, you're gonna realize it's attainable, you're gonna not be freaked out by 140 grams of protein every day, and you're gonna learn how to fit it in.

[00:43:07] Liz Haselmayer: Okay, second week, you're going to learn how to make a chicken stock. Okay, because this is such a useful thing in your kitchen. You can use it for so many different things. It's super healing. And so we'll do that. Then another week, we're going to ferment something. We're going to ferment a sauerkraut and we're going to incorporate something fresh and fermented, fresh or fermented into our meals.

[00:43:28] Liz Haselmayer: Because something that people don't really talk about a lot is everything you're eating is cooked. Where are all your enzyme rich foods? Okay, so That could be like you poured yourself a glass of raw milk and ate your spaghetti and meatballs, totally fine. Or it could be like you started your meal with a fresh veggie or fruit so that you're getting those enzymes that way.

[00:43:48] Liz Haselmayer: Maybe you're adding a fermented condiment to your plate so that you're getting enzyme rich foods that way. It was just a way to balance it out and realize, hey, everything I'm eating shouldn't be like all cooked or all raw. Maybe I should have a blend of these things to really feel like I'm getting the most out of my food.

[00:44:04] Liz Haselmayer: And then the fourth week we were like, move your body 30 minutes a day. Just move your body. Because even going for a walk seven times in a row for one week, people are like, Oh, I can do this. I think I learned that from 75 hard was like, setting this really lofty goal. And then just doing it you build up a framework then for your life of Oh, no change can happen.

[00:44:29] Liz Haselmayer: I just have to decide that I'm going to follow through. And I think the follow through piece is the hardest part for folks who are like, I want to be healthier. I want to support my family's health and wellness, but I'm just not sure how to. And so I loved the framework of this 30 day reset because it showed them that it was so possible.

[00:44:46] Liz Haselmayer: And of course the goal was like carry on the prior week into the following week. But we had a lot of people that loved that. And so I wrote up a template for that and put that in the framework as well to be like, Hey, if you want to just jumpstart your wellness journey, like here's a great way to do it.

[00:45:01] Christa Biegler, RD: I love 

[00:45:01] Christa Biegler, RD: it. 

[00:45:03] Christa Biegler, RD: And it was so attainable. I love thinking about it that way because if we change things every three days, we do operate on a weekly system. Let's just be real. We really do. And some weeks are a little off and it's Hey, I can do that thing. I just, that was fun. I hope you do it again.

[00:45:16] Christa Biegler, RD: It does feel like an eternity ago. But in a few months, you could potentially, have this real food reset again. I'd love a good alliteration. Where can people find you online? 

[00:45:30] Liz Haselmayer: Yeah. So I'm over on Instagram at homegrown underscore education. I have a website called homegrown education.org and that's where a lot of our resources are.

[00:45:39] Liz Haselmayer: We have a children's nutrition curriculum. We have the Real Food Reset, which you can get in printed or PDF form. You can find our podcast there, the Homegrown podcast. And we have a substack in YouTube as well. All of those things by the same name. So it's a, you Google homegrown education, I'm sure it will all pop up.

[00:45:56] Liz Haselmayer: But yeah, I love connecting with folks 

[00:45:57] Liz Haselmayer: yeah. 

[00:45:57] Christa Biegler, RD: When did you start all of that? How long has that been brewing and accumulating all of the resources? 

[00:46:05] Liz Haselmayer: The April of 2021 was when I launched the first workbook, but I started writing and I think 2018 or 2019. So it was a long process before launch. And then since then we've just been adding little things here and there that we feel like what can serve people.

[00:46:24] Liz Haselmayer: How 

[00:46:24] Liz Haselmayer: can we make? 

[00:46:25] Christa Biegler, RD: Same with our own life, like adding little things here and there, making it attainable. 

[00:46:31] Liz Haselmayer: Yeah. 

[00:46:31] Christa Biegler, RD: Liz, thank you so much for coming on today. 

[00:46:33] Liz Haselmayer: Thank you for having me.